[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: December 14, 2007]
In which the sun starts setting at 3pm, and as events jam the social calendar like sardines in a can, I approach the season with the annual fevers, sweats, bronchial fog, aching joints and general crankiness.
But we must dimple our ties and do our duty.
Scroll down for The Civilians' "Café-Concert".
I understand it's easier to plan parties for this week rather than next, but it means all the invitations jostling for the same midweek space. I cut the Gordian knot and went to two events at MOMA: the reception for the show of Lucian Freud's etchings, and a performance related to the Seurat exhibition.
Freud: The Weight of the Flesh
A famous name alright - Britain's greatest living artist - but for once not a blockbuster exhibition. This is, in fact, a concentrated show, in MOMA's third floor drawing galleries, devoted primarily to Freud's work in etchings during the eighties and nineties. He dabbled in the form briefly as a young man, and some examples are shown, then set it aside for many years. Some of the later etchings are aptly hung alongside oils of the same, or similar, subjects.
It's a body of work, I confess, completely new to me. Freud's distinctive portraits, usually of one figure, recumbent and showing plenty of richly painted skin, are almost over-familiar. To discover etchings at this stage is a bit like discovering sculptures (there aren't any, are there?).
Except, except...same subjects again, and really different artistic means to the same end. He seeks - very successfully - ways of moulding the volume of the human figure in two dimensions. In the paintings, color and vigor of application, and occasionally surface texture, are used to transform a plane surface into a perceived field of rounded, voluptuous shapes. His heavier models allow him to push this trick to its limits.
In the etchings, scratching and hatching is used to the same end, although the results are certainly more angular, less soft. A series of paintings and etchings of the artist's mother reflect the moderate differences in the results achieved. In the etchings, she seems to have a hardness, a wariness; in the oils, more a sagging resignation.
Resignation is everywhere, one way or another. One is reminded that Freud's figures in almost every case are slumped, resting on a hand or elbow, often recumbent. The downward drag of the bodies adds further emphasis to the great weight with which Freud endows the flesh. I think one can go further: if the dynamic upward thrust of El Greco's figures and compositions has a spiritual signification (which it does), one can hardly deny similar expressive capacity to Freud's obsession with prone-ness (his models are sometimes actually in bed).
The figures are often caught in neutral, indoor territory, sprawled over a bare bed or a couch. The figures in the work of Francis Bacon, Freud's friend and contemporary, generally share the same constrained settings (and are trapped by the same unforgiving gaze). Bacon's figures, however, are deformed, mutilated, almost decimated beyond recognition. Freud's are warm and human.
Of course, whereas Bacon's attitude to his models is bluntly sado-masochistic, Freud's models - often members of that remarkable family - seem to be people he loves or at least respects. Nonetheless, the sheer heaviness and downward trajectory Freud discovers in them is a constant reminder of the meat from which we are all made. A reminder of what another Soho denizen, Robin Cook, has called "the general contract".
Anyone interested in the sensibility shared, I believe, by these artists, might spend some time looking through a collection of photographs edited by their friend Bruce Bernard called Century. Originally a massive tome, but now available in mini-format, it is a survey of the twentieth century in the form of photographs with minimal commentary. Bernard's selection is a grim reminder of what we have been.
Freud wrestles with this in a less dramatic manner than Bacon but in pictures which similarly demand repeated and serious attention.
It opens to the public on December 16, and MOMA tells you all about it here.
The Café-Concert in Art and Song
MOMA again for an inspired program: performances by a theater group The Civilians tailored to relate to the Café-Concert drawings in the current Seurat exhibition. As The Civilians' web-site teaches, the group is currently developing a show called Paris Commune, "inspired" by a concert which took place around the time the citizens of Paris were throwing off the yoke of the regime which had led the country into its disastrous war against Prussia.
The citizens, of course, remained free of course for a little more than two months in 1871 before the Commune was bloodily repressed by the defeated French army, who doubtless found it less of a challenge to slaughter local civilians than Prussian infantry. The experience of the Commune nevertheless left much in the way of political example, literature and - apparently - music. Some of the songs in this MOMA concert were moving Communard laments.
Excellent though the performance was, before a well-chosen backdrop of contemporary art and posters, the rest of the program took a casual approach to history. This was a cabaret-Paris re-packaged as a homogenous entity and musically sugar-coated for a modern audience.
Yvette Guilbert, represented by two songs, "Madame Arthur" and "Le Fiacre", was a child during the Commune. She and Aristide Bruant - whose repetitive marching-band melodies get a Sondheim smoothing-down here - were stars in the late 1880s through the naughty '90s. "Mon Homme", better known as the jazzy "My Man" is just a twentieth century composition.
The Café-Concerts drawn by Seurat, the nightclubs painted by Lautrec, the dives opened by Bruant - these are not by any means the same thing; and twentieth century popular music is something else again. Bruant did not know syncopation: ragtime and jazz stand between him and us. At least the show delivers Debussy straight.
None of which is to say that this wasn't thoroughly enjoyable, and I'll look out for Paris Commune itself, which may be a less hybrid affair, when it opens next year.
